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An appeal to Apple from Anukari

anukari.com

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Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#161

Post by amlib »

Suppafly wrote: post #134
pjmlp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still better engineered that dealing with the distribution of the day, reinventing the way to do sound, graphics stack, UI, ...... Once upon a time I thought either GNOME or KDE would win, and we could all enjoy the one Linux distribution, I was proven wrong. Then again, I have been back on Windows as main OS since Windows 7.

>Once upon a time I thought either GNOME or KDE would win, and we could all enjoy the one Linux distribution, I was proven wrong. Linux users don't want one to win. As soon as one gained any traction, the users would switch just for the sake of it. It's also crazy how neither ever actually improves because they are so focused on copying whatever windows and mac are doing instead of continuously improving. The linux d…

> The linux desktop experience isn't any better now than it was 20 years ago.

You can't say that with a straight face. 20 or so years ago you would barely have hardware support for anything you wanted to use, or have to go trough a battery of guides just to get 50% of your computer working. Nowadays you just boot a live environment and likely 99% of your computer works out of the box, even tough your OEM gave ZERO shits about linux support.

Wi-fi was between impossible or pray it works and use a bunch of disparate of cli commands to properly join a network. Nowadays I see linux being casually used on random machines without a single problem regarding Wi-fi, and the GUIs for managing it are as cromulent as what you get on other OSes.

X kept being patched to make it do modern things it was never meant to do, thus creating a huge technical debt that is finally being payed off with proper wayland implementations.

Linux audio went from a complete turd to best in class with the "merging" (more of a complete rewrite but with full backward compatibility backed in) of pulseaudio and jack into pipewire.

It's now easy to acquire random linux desktop apps, and they keep working between upgrades! What a concept! Developers are actually finally having a decent time developing apps for desktop linux. Maybe it's no WIN32 but hey, you can run those too with WINE and PROTON trough Steam, Lutris, Bottles and so on :)

I could keep going... Honestly, just give it a try if you haven't in a while.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#162

Post by scarface_74 »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #128
scarface_74 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what are they suppose to do if not create their own frameworks to bear leverage their own hardware? Do you want them to use cross platform frameworks that are not optimized for their system?

My problems start long before the special APIs come into play. When we supported Mac, I just wrapped the APIs like you do for any other system. The problem is I don't use Mac, so building software for Macs is inherently troublesome. I can build and test for Windows just fine from Linux and OpenBSD. I can't for Mac. Now you might say this is problematic, Apple doesn't want third-party developers locking their platform…

Why would I want to use software that you never tested on the target machine?

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#163

Post by xmodem »

krackers wrote: post #135
duped wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers aren't (yet) abusing audio workgroups for all their thread pools to get pcore scheduling and higher priority. So it would imply that if an audio workgroup is issuing commands to the GPU there should be some kind of timeout to the GPU downclocking based on the last time a workgroup sent data to it. GPU audio is extremely niche these days, but with the company mentioned in TFA releasing their SDK recently it…

I'm not too familiar with audio workgroups but since the early days XNU had low-level APIs to set pthreads as pseudo-realtime

This will definitely get you to run with a higher priority than the user's time machine backup, but it's not guaranteed to get your code onto a p-core if the machine is on battery and your app doesn't have focus.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#164

Post by rock_artist »

While very different, it was already tricky in the past to make Apple silicon (on iPhones as well) perform reasonable.

Ableton engineers already evaluated this in the past: https://github.com/Ableton/AudioPerfLab

While I feel for the complaints about the Apple lack of "feedback assiting" The core issue itself is very tricky. Many years ago, before being an audio developer, I've worked in a Pro Audio PC shop...

And guess what... interrupts, abusive drivers (GPUs included) and Intels SpeedStep, Sleep states, parking cores... all were tricky.

Fast forward, We got asymmetric CPUs, arm64 CPUs and still Intel or AMDs (especially laptops) might need bios tweaks to avoid dropouts/stutters.

But if there's a broken driver by CPU or GPU... good luck reporting that one :)

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#165

Post by matwood »

johnnyjeans wrote: post #75
duped wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is "don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower" territory imo. I don't think Apple is actively hostile to 3P developers or tries to lock them in. I think they simply don't care - or lack the institutional capacity to care even if individual developers in the organization want to care. The Apple developer experience is an abject horror because they believe everyone who is capable of developing high value applications f…

I'd argue you can see the hostility if you compare shipping to Windows vs shipping to Apple. Microsoft doesn't care if you copy over your MSVC suite into a Wine environment to build your software for their platform. Even SignTool just works. It's not necessarily trivial to do, but that's simply because the MSVC suite is a horrible mess like everything else Microsoft. Apple explicitly disallows cross compilation in th…

> I'd argue you can see the hostility if you compare shipping to Windows vs shipping to Apple.

Windows has had 3rd party developers built into its DNA since the beginning though. Even today, Windows goes to great lengths to maintain backwards compatibility. I think this comes from the fact that MS has always been a software first company built around market domination.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#166

Post by matwood »

fxtentacle wrote: post #66
thraway3837 wrote: post #30

This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is. Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but stil…

The Apple DX used to be pretty great around 2010. But by now, it's laughably bad. With every additional OS update, they asked for more and more work (and expensive EV signing certificates) to keep our pro audio app working, which is why it has since been abandoned. In fact, I'm now working on a USB hardware replacement for what used to be a macOS app, simply because Apple isn't allowing enough control anymore. Their…

The DX was certainly better. I wrote some early iOS apps and the docs were good. They have never been at the MS level though, which is what I programmed for in my day job at the time. MSDN was an achievement.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#167

Post by ziml77 »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #149
duped wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically every software (except Logic) is available on Windows but users still buy Macs. Even among those users, people usually fallback to ASIO instead of directsound or wasapi backends. WASAPI requires exclusive mode to be useable for pro applications, or else your latency will suffer and they may be doing some resampling behind the scenes.

Exclusive mode is a feature, not a bug. If the user needs the bits coming out of the user's DAW to reach the speakers as pristine as possible, then the user probably doesn't want these bits mixed with any other application. If the user needs to switch between the DAW and a Youtube tutorial, then there's probably no need for exclusive mode. Latency is a valid concern, but is it really bad? PCs are fast now.

For a DAW running in exclusive mode, wouldn't they also have the option of setting the system default output to a virtual device that inputs into the DAW? That seems to me like it would be the most sensible way to handle mixing in YouTube or whatever.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#168

Post by duped »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #149
duped wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically every software (except Logic) is available on Windows but users still buy Macs. Even among those users, people usually fallback to ASIO instead of directsound or wasapi backends. WASAPI requires exclusive mode to be useable for pro applications, or else your latency will suffer and they may be doing some resampling behind the scenes.

Exclusive mode is a feature, not a bug. If the user needs the bits coming out of the user's DAW to reach the speakers as pristine as possible, then the user probably doesn't want these bits mixed with any other application. If the user needs to switch between the DAW and a Youtube tutorial, then there's probably no need for exclusive mode. Latency is a valid concern, but is it really bad? PCs are fast now.

afaik it's not possible to configure buffer size and sample rate from within a user application without exclusive mode, which actually does matter for the non-exclusive use case. iirc it was even worse where applications' streams would be resampled transparently and buffered, which is absolutely not what you want.

I don't use windows for audio anymore so I can't comment on this in win11, but it used to be that WASAPI suffered unless you set your PC in "performance" mode in your power settings whereas ASIO was unaffected.

And yes, latency matters! For live performance you're looking for < 2.5ms of one-way latency to get a roundtrip of under 5ms. After that point it starts being perceptible to players. This is not a performance floor so much as a scheduling one, and ime windows audio scheduling under dsound/wasapi was always shakey.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#169

Post by trinsic2 »

duped wrote: post #37
thraway3837 wrote: post #30

This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is. Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but stil…

I don't disagree with you, but there simply isn't an alternative for pro audio developers. You go where the users are and the majority of the market (by revenue) are Mac users. Now a lot of people may reply to this that Windows isn't that bad with ASIO (third party driver framework) or modern APIs like WASAPI (which is still lacking), or how pipewire is changing things on Linux so you don't need jack anymore (but god…

There is no buts. If you make a decision that you are going to live with a framework that is hostile to your efforts, then that is really your choice to make your life harder. If you really want to make things better for pro audio devs stop enabling organizations that want to mold you into there way of looking at the world. Blog about it and let the industry know you will not tolerate non-freedom in software. The same goes for windows people. Move away from non-open source, take back control of your life and find other endeavors that support open source until the idiots get the point. Stop enabling your jailers.

Re: An appeal to Apple from Anukari

#170

Post by [deleted] »

thraway3837 wrote: post #30

This is all just too much Stockholm syndrome. Apple’s DX (developer experience) has always been utterly abysmal, and these continued blog posts just goes to show just how bad it is. Proprietary technologies, poor or no documentation, silent deprecations and removals of APIs, slow trickle feed of yearly WWDC releases that enable just a bit more functionality, introducing newer more entrenched ways to do stuff but stil…

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